Original author: Haotian
What do you think of the recently discussed @Backpack wallet? Exchange? NFT community? You see, many people who first meet BP will be confused about how to position themselves. In my opinion, it is the super application of the trinity of NFT + wallet + compliant exchange. It can even be understood as a closed-loop ecosystem of DApp applet + wallet exchange under the xNFT protocol to cultivate users in one stop. Why? Next, let me briefly talk about my understanding.
What exactly is Backpack laying out?
If you don’t see the whole picture of what Backpack does, it’s easy to be led into fragmented perceptions. Some people love the NFT community culture of Madlads, some like the silky interactive experience of Backpack wallet, and some are optimistic about its exchange and wallet application chain. A new trading paradigm of on-chain and off-chain integration. how to say? These are the typical characteristics of BP. Compared with the current liquidity market where the blockchain ecosystem is completely separated and connected by composable lines, what BP does always makes people feel like Apples closed-loop ecosystem.
In fact, in a completely open source blockchain protocol combination market, doing closed-loop things will always seem a bit unique. But if you look at it over a long period of time, are there any losers in the ongoing battle between Android and IOS? A closed-loop ecosystem based on community attributes will have a long process of popularization with different product lines breaking through. Behind the closed product line is strong community cohesion + leading product experience + powerful resource consolidation capabilities, which will form a joint force at a certain point in time and become a competitive barrier that others cannot surpass. There was Apple before and Xiaomi next, and they are all doing this kind of business layout.
2) The entire product line of Backpack at this stage has obvious Solana ecological imprint, which means that its development will also be heavily bound to the Solana ecosystem. To a certain extent, Backpack has built a set of Native wallet + exchange and a set of xNFT applet DApp application market for the Solana ecosystem.
In the short term, Backpack has obvious advantages and disadvantages in competing with other products and protocols in the full blockchain environment. For example, compared with ordinary CEX, Backpack cannot cover the full blockchain ecosystem in a timely manner to gain first-mover advantages in listing various coins and attract a wide range of users. user group, but there is no doubt that some projects with obvious Solana genes can be fermented and grown in Backpack, and some early users who heavily participated in the Solana ecosystem will also receive greater expected market returns.
What are the challenges and problems faced by Backpack?
Because of this, Backpack is bound to encounter certain resistance in the process of expanding the market. The airdrop distribution incident is a typical example. Objectively speaking, due to compliance factors, Backpack selects high-quality projects and issues Airdrops to users who contribute transaction volume. This is a long-term incentive and gain behavior. In the long run, users who are BPs will definitely have better benefits. For users, it is equivalent to earning a stable high annualized amount on an exchange. However, as mentioned above, user welfare is the secondary distribution of the platforms consolidation of resources. The intensity of single user participation , the amount of capital investment, and the key is that the project party’s expected release of chips requires coordination by the platform. It’s okay to extend the cycle to achieve comprehensive returns, but it’s difficult to focus on a single instance of brush volume + airdrop returns. Even if it is not handled well, public opinion will backfire.
Why is this happening?
In essence, Backpack is a platform that gathers and integrates resources, attracts high-quality project parties to issue airdrops, and then attracts high-quality users to drive growth. This will be a long-term and dynamic tradeoff process. The platform cannot guarantee that 100% of users will obtain absolute benefits in every operation. After all, it is the project party that distributes the chips, the total amount of airdrops is constant, and the amount of users and funds participating in airdrop activities is uncontrollable. It must be less, it’s a simple truth.
In essence, this is an incentive process of chip distribution. The platform is a reward mechanism that achieves the goals of attracting new users, increasing activity, and user participation and retention. How to avoid being counterattacked is actually a technical job. Instead of taking the risk of loss with the mentality of gaining excess arbitrage returns in the short term, it is better to lengthen the cycle and calculate the rate of return from a longer-term perspective. On the one hand, the platform relies on resource premiums to obtain Airdrop Benefits already have top-level resource advantages (Pyth, W, etc.). On the other hand, after all, Backpack’s own platform growth expectations (coin issuance) are also a “gap-compensating” benefit that will be implemented at some point in the future.
How to define the industry value of Backpack?
Backpack I tend to regard it as a super application derived from @solanas high-performance layer 1 public chain.
In the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems, everyone is happy to tell the story of layer 2 infra, but the application story has been delayed until at least the next bull-bear conversion cycle due to the implementation being less than expected. In contrast, Solanas ecological difference is quite large. It focuses on high-performance public chains, plays MeMe to attract incremental users outside the market, and plans DePINs super narrative to lay the foundation for future application implementation. In the process, a large number of DeFi and Games have also been derived. , NFT, Payment and other various methods. There is a feeling that the Solana ecosystem has been developing with the genes of web2+web3 from beginning to end. Therefore, the development of applications is an issue that cannot be avoided, and will also become the main theme of the current bull market of the Solana ecosystem.
At this stage, almost every blockchain system is faced with the objective factor that there is more room for imagination in telling B-side stories than in C-side applications. Therefore, when everyone is playing layer 2 and other infra is in full swing, the Solana ecosystem has grown NFT+ wallet+ Compliance exchanges are a trinity of super application paradigms. NFT provides community culture and stickiness, wallets serve as user participation portals and DApp application distribution centers, and compliance exchanges provide a compliance channel for deposits to connect with the real world.
At a time when the entire blockchain ecosystem is criticizing the financial hype attribute for being too heavyweight, Backpacks super application paradigm is more like importing a mature product line growth model of web2 into a web3 environment. It will have certain guiding significance for the maturity of the industry by accelerating the implementation of application ecology and the popularization of mature web2 product power philosophy.
above
Based on the above observation, it is not difficult to understand some of the problems BackPack currently faces:
1) Too strong a community attribute is both an advantage and a disadvantage of large-scale expansion of the population. A large number of people who did not participate in the community in the early stage, including me, will be passively brought into the community;
2) Too much emphasis on compliance attributes is the foundation for its future expansion and strength, but this also limits the diversification of early products and models and requires sustained long-term growth drive;
3) Super application is always a good story, but when will the entire Crypto put aside infra and focus more on the application of the story? This is not a challenge faced by Solana as an ecosystem. Builders in the entire Crypto full-chain environment are following suit.
I have often said that Solana, as a high-performance layer 1, is developing an advanced public chain form that leads the advancement of Crypto infra architecture. It seems that now I have to add a footnote to this judgment. The DApp applet and Backpack software under the xNFT protocol are integrated The closed-loop system is also leading the integration of web2 and web3 applications ahead of the times.
Note: Many people must be paying attention to Backpack because of the growth expectations of its FTX 2.0. They all want to know what kind of development height a project that has FTX genes and the same background, and can learn lessons and start again will reach. ? Might as well, wait and see.
